yes, it would sound, if not like a direct reproach, then at the very least like an implication of something preposterous. Faith—in the regime? Can a prisoner believe in the bars of his cage? And if he does, is it because he is blind or because he is perversely welded to it in his soul and in his mind? Today I would call this a Kafkaesque situation. But the ‘I’ who comes back to me in the shape of memories of youth rejects today’s words. What you call ‘regime’ is for him a way of being . A way of being that cannot help being better than the one that went before—than all those that went before. A way of being that will definitely be that way, and therefore is. An upside-down ladder: move downward, from the desired to what ‘has been’! All around you are human beings, human needs and pleasures, but for you there is nothing but a prologue, or even the prologue of a prologue. Is this self-deception? Before I can agree, I will ask: Isn’t there self- deception in any faith, any claim on truth (which is always unique)? If we take self-deception out of history, will there be any history left? The gap between epochs, the break between generations is equal to a lack of coincidence between words. Connections are to be found precisely in the realization of this lack of coincidence. Precisely there.” Mikhail Gefter, Ekho Kholokosta i russkii evreiskii vopros (Moscow: Rossiiskaia biblioteka Kholokosta, 1995), 176. 196. Raisa Orlova, Memoirs , trans. Samuel Cioran (New York: Random House, 1983), 3, 7. For the original, see Orlova, Vospominaniia , 13, 17. 197. Aleksandra Brushtein, Doroga ukhodit vdal’ (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1965). 198. Rothman and Lichter, Roots of Radicalism , 81–82; Percy S. Cohen, Jewish Radicals and Radical Jews (London: Academic Press, 1980), 20–21; Feuer, The Conflict of Generations , 423; Liebman, Jews and the Left , 67–69. 199. Rothman and Lichter, Roots of Radicalism , 215–16. 200. Ibid., 216–17, 219. 201. Roth, American Pastoral , 255, 386. 202. Will Herberg, Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1960), 189–90. See also Glazer, American Judaism , 106–28; and Neusner, American Judaism , passim. The “gruesomely misbegotten” quotation is from Roth, American Pastoral , 412. 203. Elie Wiesel, “Trivializing the Holocaust: Semi-Fact and Semi-Fiction,” New York Times , April 16, 1978, 2:1, 29. See also Novick, The Holocaust in American Life , 211; and Tim Cole, Selling the Holocaust: From Auschwitz to Schindler, How History Is Bought, Packaged, and Sold (New York: Routledge, 1999), 16 and passim. 204. B. Morozov, ed., Evreiskaia emigratsiia v svete novykh dokumentov (Tel Aviv: Ivrus, 1998), 7–43; Stefani Hoffman, “Jewish Samizdat and the Rise of Jewish National Consciousness,” in Jewish Culture and Identity in the Soviet Union , ed. Yaacov Ro’i and Avi Becker (New York: New York University Press, 1991), 89–94. 205. Agurskii, Pepel Klaasa , 325–26; Markish, Stol’ dolgoe vozvrashchenie , 338. 206. Agurskii, Pepel Klaasa , 243. 207. Ibid., 325–26. Markish, Stol’ dolgoe vozvrashchenie , 339. 208. Markish, Stol’ dolgoe vozvrashchenie , 341. 209. Morozov, Evreiskaia emigratsiia , 199. 210. Ibid., 199, 165–67. See also Yaacov Ro’i, “Soviet Policy towards Jewish Emigration: An Overview,” in Lewin-Epstein et al., Russian Jews on Three Continents , 45–67. 211. Morozov, Evreiskaia emigratsiia , 95–96, 110, 200, 166–67. 212. J. J. Goldberg, Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1996), 174. See also 167–74. 213. Gitelman, “From a Northern Country,” 25–26, 28–30; Morozov, Evreiskaia emigratsiia , 24; Yehuda Dominitz, “Israel’s Immigration Policy and the Dropout Phenomenon,” in Lewin-Epstein et al., Russian Jews on Three Continents , 113–27. 214. Meromskaia-Kol’kova, Nostal’giia , 8.